I’ve written about my terrible experience with the LIDL rotary tool in a previous Tool Troubles post. For those of you who need a recap: it died on its first real use and LIDL took two full months to get a replacement to me. Bad product, horrible service. And the replacement worked, but had some of the same odd heating issues, and I assumed from the moment I noticed it that the replacement wouldn’t last either.

And today it died. It held together for about… 30 minutes of total usage, if even that. Probably not even that. I was using it today and it just stopped rotating while I was in the middle of sanding. I’d used it for less than a minute. It wasn’t even being used strenuously… I was just carving away some foam, which takes very little.

And now, of course, I’m stuck on at least one project, possibly two. I don’t think I’m even going to bother trying to contact LIDL for yet another replacement. It’s probably under warranty but I don’t want to wait another two months to get another replacement that’ll probably also have the exact same issues. It just isn’t worth it.

This is certainly putting a delay on my projects and a damper on my spirits… I’ve looked around and my father might be able to lend me a temporary replacement, as I believe he owns an old FERM rotary tool that he’s never used… I’ll have to look further into that. And in the meantime, I’ll start looking for a better rotary tool, perhaps an actual Dremel.

Who knows?

Maybe I’ll get lucky and get something that can last more than 30 minutes.

Turns out good paints are pretty expensive. Before I went out to our local art store, Total-Artist. I want to write about this, but first, please check out their website, and marvel with me at a website that seems to have been transported straight out of the 1990’s, and still doesn’t have a secure version of the site despite it being 2019. Geez…

Anyway, my dad and I went down to their store, and spent a good half hour looking for paints. I had some idea of what I wanted the knife to look, but I hadn’t made any hard choices at the time yet, so this process ended up taking a while as I weighed my various options. In the end, here’s what I bought:

The W&N Galeria is a good quality paint. Not the best, but a big step up from the cheap stuff with massive amounts of filler that you can find at discount stores. The Amsterdam Expert is, as the name suggests, a high quality paint – with a price tag to match. I needed an greenish oxide color and would’ve gotten a W&N Galeria, but that range didn’t have a matching color. The Amsterdam Expert was more expensive at half the contents, but since I knew I wasn’t going to use much of it, I figured what the hell, I’ll get that instead.

The Gold and Silver metallic paints I didn’t plan on using immediately, I just wanted to have them in case I ended up doing any unplanned details, on this project or any others.

Since my prop was fully primed, I could jump into it right away. I started by painting the blade with my metallic copper. Even at a single layer, I was super pleased with the first results – especially compared to the unpainted version:

Before paint

First layer of copper paint

The next step was to paint the detail areas of the blade – specifically, the blade edge, and the logo. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do about the logo, to be honest. I knew I wanted it to have a different color, and I knew I wanted it to “pop”… but I had a hard time deciding on a color. I was leaning towards red, which would blend nicely with the copper tones, and would probably have worked well. On the other hand, I knew that I wanted to add blood spatter detail in the final phase of painting the ritual knife, and red on red doesn’t work that well. After some careful consideration, I decided to paint the logo with a mix of blue (from my super cheap paints) and chrome oxide green.

So here’s a funny thing. I looked up detail of how paints work and what’s in them before I bought my paints. Short version, cheap paints have less pigment and more filler – thus requiring many many more layers than good paints to get the same coverage. I knew this in theory. But theory and practice are two different beasts. Because as I mixed equal parts (super cheap) blue and (very expensive) green, the result I ended up with was… green. Just green. Practically no difference.

In the end I had to keep mixing in more and more blue, and even some white, to get the green to change color. It’s easy to write or talk about how expensive paints are “better” because they have “more pigment”. But this particular case really drove that home. I needed about twelve times the amount of blue to get my green to change. So here’s my advice to anyone reading this: if you remotely can, do yourself a favor and just buy good paints from the start.Or at the very least, don’t mix in super cheap paints with your quality paints. It’s going to get messy…

Still, I was happy with the results:

You’ll notice I also painted the knife edge already. I mixed some silver and copper to get a bit of a champagne look. Next, I painted the handle. I wanted this to look like old, darkened wood, and it was a bit of a challenge as – if you’ll remember – I’d never done something like this before.

I started with a brown base coat. Then I realized I could fake a grain by using a small needle to make scratches into my paint while it’s drying. I did this a couple of times to get some grooves into the handle. If you look closely, you’ll notice that the brown isn’t consistent throughout. This is on purpose, as wood isn’t just one color either, and having lighter and darker areas helps sell the effect:

Next, I wanted to add the chrome oxide green to help make the damaged areas appear more damaged. After all, it makes no sense that the massive X-shaped cut in the blade is exactly the same color and texture as the rest of the blade. I also wanted to have some of that green oxidation around the logo area, where things such as moisure would naturally build up in the nooks and crannies to slowly eat away at the blade. The result immediately looked better than before:

I was in the home stretch at this point, but there were a few more things to do. To start, I wasn’t entirely happy with the wood of my handle, so I spent a couple hours over several days adding a few more layers of various browns on top of it. I found out that I could add to the effect by using another kind of brush with harder bristles and a dry-brushing technique to make the wood look even more like wood. I also finally painted the connecting bit between the handle and the blade – nothing too fancy.

Then, the time finally came for weathering. Oh yes. I’d been looking forward to this. I was excited and terrified. Excited because I was so close to finishing my first real prop, and terrified because doing something wrong in the weathering stage can make or break a prop. I did some edge highlighting, followed by black-washing.

First the edge highlighting. This is a super subtle effect that you probably wouldn’t even notice if somebody didn’t point it out to you. This is where you go over the edges of a prop and dry-brush some lighter color onto the edges in semi-random locations.

For an example of this effect, look at the computer generated image below. Notice that on the side with edge highlighting, the edges seem to have more definition and “pop” more.

Next was the black-washing. If you’re unfamiliar with the terminology, it’s where you take a black paint, thin it, and apply it very liberally to the prop, and then try to clean it immediately, but do a deliberately bad job of it. The result is that the black will settle into the various nooks and crannies, and stay there. This simulates the way dirt builds up into those areas over time in the real world – but at a fraction of the time.

For an example of this effect…. well, heh. Here’s the result. You can just compare it with the previous image:

before black-wash

during/after black-wash

You may have picked up on this, but edge highlighting and black-washing work well together. The reason for this is that where the edge highlighting adds more lighter areas, the black-wash adds more darker areas. Together, they make even the flattest paint job look better.

And with this, the knife is DO…

… nooope. Not yet done. Almost!

I mentioned blood spatter. This is meant to be a RITUAL KNIFE. And you can’t have a proper Ye olde ritual knife without some blood spatter and blood detail. Tune in next time for that final touch, and what you’ve all been waiting for: the final pictures of the finished project!

This was my first time really using this particular primer, and my results were mixed. Let’s start with the negative, and begin with the obvious.

The knife was a relatively small prop, and SEAL Prime comes in a aerosol spray can. Like almost all spray cans, it has a wide nozzle, and consequently suffers from some serious overspray. Given that a single 400ml can costs about €12, that’s a lot of money to spray into thin air. I also only had the one can at the time, so…. not off to a great start.

For the record, I did manage to cover the knife perfectly with two good layers using the one can, but I easily lost half the contents, which was about €6 worth.

The other problem I ran into with SEAL Prime is that is designed to highlight imperfections. So when I scuffed a bit of the knife with sanding paper for “prop damage”, that entire area refused to smooth out, making it stand out significantly from the rest of the foam – even despite having heat-sealed the “damaged” area before applying the primer. And again, the product is designed to do this. And that’s cool, and it can be incredibly useful… but it’s definitely something to be aware of if you’re trying to get the area to look smooth (which, for a knife edge, you really kind of do).

But, it’s not all bad news.

One thing I love about SEAL Prime is that it comes out almost-dry. It dries very fast, and as a result, there is no dripping, which really helps with oddly shaped props. (It does begin dripping if you apply a very thick layer, but you shouldn’t do that to begin with. Being able to pick up your prop so soon and turn it around and get better coverage without strange droop marks was very nice.

I also love that it can be used to highlight imperfections. This really is both a negative and a positive. If used properly, this can really help you make ridges and edges pop. Some of the deeper battle damage “cuts” I added to the knife would have probably gotten “blurred out” with many other primers, and have lost detail. It’s a non-issue with the SEAL Prime.

Easily my favorite feature about SEAL Prime is that it’s incredibly flexible. Like, freakishly so. I didn’t have a lot of experience with many primers, but I was very impressed with the SEAL Prime’s flexibility. I was able to take my knife, and bend the entire blade 180 degrees, and there was no breaking, cracking, or tearing at all. In fact, there wasn’t even any discernible rippling. It genuinely is some impressive stuff.

Once I was finished, my white-foam knife was covered in black primer, and it was ready to be painted. You know, in theory. Because, uh, I didn’t actually have any proper paints. I had some cheap paints, which is better than nothing, but I wanted my knife to have a copper-bronze look, and you need proper metallic paints for that. But we’ll cover that next time.

As always, thanks for your continued interest in my journey to learn this stuff, and for supporting me and my projects!

It took me a long time to decide what to do with this knife, but I eventually decided that I was going to turn it into a dark cultist group’s ritual knife. I really wanted a logo that I could slap onto the knife, and I wanted that logo to be done out of 2mm foam instead of just being painted on. That way I could practice weathering the crevices and such later during the painting stage, as well.

I made a tiny mistake in that I quickly slapped together the general shape of the knife with no regard for what else I might have to do, which left me with very little room… the knife blade’s width minus the “sharpened edge” was about 4.5cm. I also didn’t want my raised cultist logo to go edge-to-edge, which… you just don’t do. That looks immediately wrong. So I took off another 5mm so I’d have a 2.5mm margin at the top and bottom, leaving me with only 4cm to use for the logo (and about 20cm on the other axis).

I opened up Inkscape and set up a 4cm by 20cm drawing, and essentially just spent an afternoon trying out various ideas until I came up with the idea of using a pattern based on a rose stem with thorns, with an added swirl. It still took a while to get a result I was happy with. I wanted to get something that would match that idea, look good, and be symmetrical (so that the logo looks the same when the knife is turned upside-down). In the end, I came up with this, as well as the name “Cult of Thorns”:

While I was writing this article, I didn’t have access to the original artwork, which I forgot to upload from my hobby room’s computer – so I reconstructed this particular version of the logo artwork from a photo. Some of the lines are a bit too straight because it was a rushed job, but you get the idea.

When the logo was finished, I opened a new A4-sized Inkscape document and copy-pasted the logo several times. I was able to comfortably fit six onto a single page. I then printed the document onto a single sheet of regular 80-grams A4 paper, and cut out all six rectangles. I only needed two, but it’s good to have spares…

Of course, I didn’t need the logo on paper. I needed it in foam. So what I did was cut off two pieces of 2mm foam that were about the size of the rectangles of paper. I then used some masking tape to tape the paper more or less in place:

I was then able to use a sharp knife to ever-so-carefully cut deeply into the lines on the paper, to cut the foam underneath into the shape of the outline above it:

I then repeated it for the entire process on the other side of the knife. Because of my health issues, I had a lot of trouble pushing down the knife and making a deep enough cut. The next time I do this, I’m going to make sure to start with a fresh blade. Some of the cuts didn’t go all the way through, so I had some clean-up to do to get a result I was satisfied with. Luckily, that didn’t take as much work as I’d thought.

With both pieces finished, I was able to heat-seal them, and then use contact cement to glue them to the blade of the knife. This was my first time working with the stuff, so the results are kind of messy… but it worked:

At this point, I still felt like something was missing… the knife, for being a ritual knife, felt entirely too clean. So I whipped out my rotational multi-tool and added some damage to the flat areas. If you look very carefully, you can also tell that this is where I started making thin cuts into the blade’s edge to give it that stripey look knife edges tend to have:

Since I had some fresh damage, that meant foam that wasn’t heat-sealed. I got out my heat gun to seal the new areas. This is also where I learned another important thing about heat guns. You’ve gotta be careful using the heat gun around glued areas. That stuff can burn and release Bad Things into the air if you keep the heat gun in one spot for too long:

Speaking of mistakes with the heat gun, don’t over-heat your foam, either. That’s what I did by accident with the foam logo that was meant for the back side of the blade. The foam will deform, and it will become very difficult to get it back into its original, intended shape. I tried to repair the logo it back but you can tell it doesn’t look quite right anymore:

Still, I wasn’t going to redo it. This was my first project, and I felt I was allowed to make a few mistakes. Besides, it helps me warn other creators not to make this mistake, with the photos to show what can happen.

I was a bit upset at the logo having gone wrong, but I was otherwise happy enough with my Cult of Thorns Ritual Knife at this point, in terms of its basic shape as well as its detail work.

Tune in soon for the next post about this project, where I’ll detail the paint job, which is where the project really takes comes into its own!

]]>https://www.ninjy.com/np/projects/cult-of-thorns-ritual-knife-part-2/feed/0Cult of Thorns Ritual Knife (Part 1)https://www.ninjy.com/np/projects/cult-of-thorns-ritual-knife-part-1/
https://www.ninjy.com/np/projects/cult-of-thorns-ritual-knife-part-1/#respondThu, 03 Jan 2019 20:16:44 +0000https://www.ninjy.com/np/?p=287Read More]]>About a month ago, I finished my first project – a knife. It wasn’t based on anything in particular… I just needed a project to get started, and it had to be something relatively simple – so I went with a basic-shape dagger. I’ll start detailing the project in the following few posts.

This knife project was my first. That means that at the point that I started making my knife, I had no skills and no experience to speak of. I picked a knife because I thought the basic shapes would help me get a first project finished within a reasonable time frame.

The base of the knife came together easily enough, consisting of just four separate pieces of foam: one piece for the blade, one piece for connection bit between the handle and the blade, and two pieces for the handle:

All four pieces started out as rectangles cut from 1 centimeter thick EVA foam. The edge of the knife I free-handed into a shape I thought looked cool. I then beveled the blade’s edges near the hilt a little bit. The connecting piece of the hilt I beveled as well.

For the handle itself I glued two pieces of foam together. At the time I did this, I didn’t have any contact cement (which is what’s most often used to glue foam), so everything was glued together using superglue. I then roughly rounded it with my rotational multi-tool.

I did all of this in about two hours, which was fast for me. And I did it without any plans… in fact, I didn’t even have a computer in my hobby room at that stage yet, so I couldn’t really look up any examples, either. I do believe it worked to my favor — it’s certainly a unique enough shape that one probably wouldn’t easily confuse it for any other iconic blades. I, at least, was really happy with it, even at this early stage. I had something that I could genuinely hold in my hands and faux-stab people with (my father was quite amused).

At the time, I wasn’t sure where I’d go with this next, and it took me a while to figure things out… but keep an eye on this blog. In the next post, I’ll detail the detail work I did next, to add some additional flavor to the project.

Thanks for your continued interest in and support of my journey and my projects!

]]>https://www.ninjy.com/np/projects/cult-of-thorns-ritual-knife-part-1/feed/0Accidental Art – 27 Dec 2018https://www.ninjy.com/np/accidental-art/accidental-art-27-dec-2018/
https://www.ninjy.com/np/accidental-art/accidental-art-27-dec-2018/#respondThu, 27 Dec 2018 23:00:50 +0000https://www.ninjy.com/np/?p=279I call this, “The Swamp Monster”. This is really pushing the boundaries of the “accidental” in its category title, but I’ve decided to stick with that category for these works anyway. Because I can. Enjoy!

It was 90% of the way there when I was done using browns and reds on a project I’m currently working on for my mom, so I looked at the what I had, came up with the title, and added a couple more lines to really make it fit.

There’s a couple of respected brands and models available, with a variety of different pros and cons and features they may or may not have, but I ended up getting a Silhouette Cameo 3.

If you’re like 99.9% of the population, you’ll have never heard of a Cameo or even cutters like this in general. The Cameo, and other cutters like it, are dedicated machines that can cut (a limited number of) materials for you based on input parameters given to it using special computer software.

More specifically, here’s what a generic workflow using the Cameo 3 might look like:

Download or create a graphic using any regular graphic design software (I like using GIMP and Inkscape), or in Silhouette Studio directly

If necessary, import the graphics into Silhouette Studio

Use the built-in tools to quickly convert the graphics into “cutting paths”

Put a piece of material (paper, cardboard, vinyl) on the appropriate cutting mat (they come in high-tack and low-tack variations, depending on the material you’d like to cut)

Place the cutting mat onto the indicated loading position on the Cameo, and push the on-screen display button to load it.

Using the Silhouette Studio software, send the active task to the Cameo 3, and watch it kick into action

Wait for the Cameo 3 to finish cutting, then unload the results using the on-screen display button.

“But,” you might ask, “why do you need a computer-controlled and pricey piece of hardware to do what anyone can do by hand?”

I’m glad you asked.

There are several reasons for anyone to want a cutter like the Cameo 3. The most obvious reasons are reproducibility and precision. If you need an identical design more than once, being able to just press a button a few more times is hard to beat. On top of that, devices like this have no problem being accurate down to a tenth of a millimeter, which is great. Intricate designs that would be incredibly difficult to do by hand are also no issue whatsoever.

These are the same reasons we use printers instead of writing or drawing by hand when we want something that we might want more than one of, or that would take too long to do by hand.

There’s another reason, though, and that’s a far more personal one: I have bad joints. If you’ve known me for any length of time, you’ll probably know this. I have more or less random better and worse days, but even on my better days, I can’t cut things for long. It’s genuinely difficult for me to hold a knife and cut things for more than a few minutes. Some days, it’s just impossible, and even the least bit of force on the joints on my fingers is enough to put me in a lot of pain.

For me, having a piece of hardware that’s designed to do the cuts that would be difficult and painful for me to do (if I could even do them at all) is a way to work around a disability. It enables me to do things I thought I wouldn’t be able to do anymore, and even go beyond that when needed. And that’s just magnificent.

Here’s a quick test I did when I first got my Cameo 3 all hooked up. I made the design (if you can call it that) in Silhouette Studio using the built-in text tool. The heart image I downloaded and used the built-in auto-trace tool on to turn it into a matching cutting path. I then sent the cutting task to my Cameo and had it cut this out of a sheet of vinyl. I then manually took out the letters, and used the remaining part as a stencil that I applied just long enough to spray-paint the heart and letters onto a leftover furniture panel:

The results are striking, especially when you consider that I had almost no experience with cutting machines, that the surface was a prelaminated furniture panel that’s designed to clean well (and not designed to be painted on) and was not prepared for paint in any way (no sanding or priming). The results were still pretty amazing – not necessarily for the results themselves, but for the future potential that they represent.

I will say that it was a tough choice to spend so much on something that’s seemingly so simple, and I had to work hard to convince myself – using many of the arguments I’ve outlined above. I saved up for this for a while. Part of the refund I got from returning my broken scroll saw went towards this. I’d also like to thank my dad and my mom, who together pitched in over half the purchase price as a belated birthday present.

But really, I’m incredibly happy that I’ve added the Silhouette Cameo 3 to my arsenal of tools. You can expect me to begin using it in my projects soon, as well. Look forward to that!

Editorial note: I actually bought my Silhouette Cameo 3 a month and a half ago, at this point… I just hadn’t gotten around to writing about it yet! Sorry!

]]>https://www.ninjy.com/np/tools/new-tool-automated-cutter/feed/0How to make paint last longerhttps://www.ninjy.com/np/tricks-of-the-trade/how-to-make-paint-last-longer/
https://www.ninjy.com/np/tricks-of-the-trade/how-to-make-paint-last-longer/#respondWed, 19 Dec 2018 19:29:11 +0000https://www.ninjy.com/np/?p=257Read More]]>So you’re working on a project, and have a bunch of paint on your palette that you’ve paintstakingly mixed to the right color, when you realize that, oops, you can’t finish in time. And leaving your possibly pricey paints out to dry and become useless feels terrible. Now what?

If you’ve done even the slightest bit of painting work then you’ve probably run into this scenario or one similar to it, and it’s never fun. It’s not a major issue if you’re using cheap paints, as you can just clean your palette and put new paint on it the next day. But as you start using higher quality paint, you’ll really want to throw away as little of it as possible, or it can get expensive. All of this is even more so true if you’ve spent 20 minutes mixing your paints to get the perfect color, and don’t remember how you got there exactly… few things are worse for painters than an unintentionally blotchy paint job.

If you spend any amount of time working with paint you’ll quickly find that paint dries more slowly with minimal airflow and high humidity, and we can actually use that knowledge to our benefit by creating that environment in a small scale.

To do this, you only need a couple of very basic materials. First, you’ll need a container large enough for your paint palette that you can close off from at least regular airflow. If you have or can get a container with an airtight seal, that would work even better (but it’s certainly not required). Second, you’ll need some enough sponges to cover the bottom of the container. Third, some ordinary paper towels.

Get the container, and put the sponges on the bottom. Try to fill up the area if you can. Most sponges are easy to cut with knives or scissors. Put some kitchen paper on top of the sponges, wrapping it around to the bottom if necessary. Then just put a little bit of water inside the container — it doesn’t have to be visibly filled, you just want to make sure the sponges and paper towels are sufficiently soaked:

What you’ve just created is the perfect environment to make paint last. Low or zero airflow with high humidity. Just put in your paint palette and close the lid, then store the container somewhere dark and cool. Paint that would have gone off in less than 3 hours can be made to last 3 days or even longer this way.

Before you close your browser, there’s one important caveat that needs to be mentioned. You’ve created an environment that’s low on air flow, very high in humidity, and if you’ve followed instructions, is also dark, and cold. Because paint thrives under these conditions.

But, so does mold.

This is a great solution in a pinch, but it isn’t a perfect one. You’ll inevitably get mold in your container if you keep it sitting there uncleaned, but that’s the price you’ll have to pay to keep your opened or mixed paint usable.

Don’t keep your containers longer than a week without cleaning them thoroughly, and that includes a good antimicrobial wash (or replacing of) the sponges, and fully replacing the paper towels. Otherwise, this could happen:

Granted, it actually worked longerthan the first rotational multi-tool or the first heat-gun did, but it really didn’t last long. And it didn’t even fail catastrophically, as the other two did. Like my mom said to the school teachers one parent’s day — this one’s a little special.

I’d originally wanted to buy the blue FERM SSM1005 (left) but it was sold out everywhere at the time. As I kept searching for alternatives I came across the Powerplus POWX190 (right) and I realized that the two are completely identical. Presumably both devices are made from a single manufacturer that sells just brand-able versions of their tools.

I preferred the more muted colors of the FERM, because I believe tools should have muted colors that don’t distract, but since the FERM wasn’t available, I went with the Powerplus. And it worked fine, at first. Of course, if you’ve read the previous two installments of the Tool Troubles saga, you’ll know that “it worked fine at first” has become entirely devoid of meaning for me. It doesn’t mean anything for the continued functioning of the product. As was the case here, eventually as well.

As with so many power tools, I’d never used a scroll saw before. I’d been trying to hone my skills on a piece of <2mm hardboard by trying to cut out letters and characters cleanly over a period of several days. I should have been getting better, but instead my results were getting less precise, my cuts increasingly off the lines, and it was getting harder to feed the hardboard through the saw. And I couldn’t figure out why.

I slept on it, and considered that perhaps the blade had worn out. I hadn’t really used it that much yet, but it was the initial blade that came with the hardware, and I have some experience with tools being supplied with “consumable” components that offer a poor user experience (brand new printers with almost-empty ink cartridges, anyone?). So I decided to try putting in a new blade — luckily I’d actually bought a pack of blades when I’d purchased the machine just for this type of a scenario.

I keep all manuals and spare parts in a single container for just such occasions, so I grabbed both the pack of replacement blades and the instruction manual and started the process of replacing the blade. That’s when I saw the problem.

The way scroll saws work is that a special cutting blade with metal teeth is held at the far ends of a rectangular frame inside the tool’s outer shell. The blade is often fastened through a simple tension system. The inner frame is moved rapidly up and down by a motor, moving the blade, and thereby letting the blade’s teeth cut into the material. The outer shell protects from these internals, leaving only the business end of the blade exposed (and even that has a safety cap):

It’s actually an incredibly simple system when you think about it, and when a scroll saw is built well it can be incredibly effective. But it has to be built properly, and as it turns out, mine wasn’t. Specifically, the bottom holder for the blades was at an angle. The blades are of a thin enough metal that they are somewhat flexible, and can twist in ways they shouldn’t, so I never noticed this until I looked for what was going wrong.

In order to get clean cuts the bottom and top halves of the blade-holding mechanism need to be at exactly the same angle. Otherwise the blade twists. When that happens, the teeth are no longer straightly aligned, and it becomes difficult to get a straight cut.

Since the blade is moved up and down constantly, a twisted blade also results in all cuts being wider. Movement becomes less predictable as well. Because a twisted blade by definition is also under greater tension than the tools are actually designed for, blade snapping was a real and scary possibility (which, luckily, didn’t happen in my case).

I’m still not sure how that happened, exactly. I hadn’t done anything particularly strenuous with the scroll saw, so it I’m not sure how I might have caused it. It could also have been a day 1 defect that I just hadn’t noticed. Either way, this definitely shouldn’t happen, and it did. And there was nothing I could do about it. There was no way for me to get to the bottom holder and re-align and/or re-tighten it.

The entire thing still worked, it just wasn’t usable anymore. In the end, with no other options, and replacements being difficult for complicated reasons, I opted to send the entire thing back for a full refund. I even managed to get a refund for the pack of replacement blades I’d bought with it (since, without a scroll saw, I had no use for those).

I still don’t have a scroll saw, although I’m sure I’ll get one again eventually. Since this was the third broken tool in an exceptionally short period of time, I just didn’t have it in me anymore to try to find another one right away. But I had my money back, at least… and there were other tools I had my eyes on. So I opted to put aside the money and continue to save for one other tool in particular. And I did buy that other tool!

Curious what I ended up buying? I actually meant to write about it weeks ago, and I promise I’ll really write about it soon – because it’s really cool and I can’t wait to share it. So continue following the blog, and keep an eye out for that post!